Mahdi Hazaveh

install and use xdebug with Laravel Herd

Ever since the release of Laravel Herd it has become my simple setup for having PHP locally available on my Mac. This has been super helpful as I do not need to run my docker containers locally as we all know docker on Mac doesn’t rock like how it does on Linux.

Laravel Herd has released support for xdebug recently but its a shame that is is only available for users with PRO subscriptions, but fortunately, it is not that difficult to install and enable xdebug on Laravel Herd PHP.

to install xdebug, we need pecl on the machine, which requires PHP. to have that up and running quickly install php via homebrew

$ brew install php

once that is out of the way, you can quickly install xdebug with pecl which is now available after installing php.

pecl install xdebug

once this command spit out all the output, the location of xdebug extension will be printed out. you should look at the output for something like this

now all you have to do is to add this following two lines to your php.ini config shipped with your Laravel Herd.

// make sure the line below is replaced with the correct value of your xdebug installation path!
zend_extension=/opt/homebrew/Cellar/php/8.3.4/pecl/20230831/xdebug.so
xdebug.mode=coverage

the php.ini for your php version should live under ~/Library/Application\ Support/Herd/config/php/{phpversion}/php.ini

That’s pretty much it, doing a simple php -v should give you the confirmation that Xdebug is available!

Verify Domain Ownership in PHP

Have you ever wondered how can you verify if a user in your application owns an internet domain? This is not something that most of us have not seen before, most of the tools we use such as Google Search Console and many SaaS platforms such as email delivery services have the process of verifying domain ownership.

a while back working on a project I had to implement the same logic, the user verifies that they own a domain and this would grant them to allow any email address under their domain name to join their organization in our application. I have extracted this logic into an open-source PHP package.

PHP Link Preview: an open-source package to generate URL Previews

as part of working on our SaaS application, I had to find a way to get some metadata about URLs to generate previews for links.

These sorts of metadata can mostly be grabbed from OG and Meta tags of a web page if they exist. To achieve this I have created PHP Link Preview an open source composer package that makes it easy to parse web pages and grab this information.

So if you are looking to know how to generate link previews using PHP you’re in the right place.

VitoDeploy: opensource alternative to Laravel Forge

In this post, I will introduce you to a friendly open-source server management tool VitoDeploy, a project beautifully crafted and thoughtfully designed by one of my best friends Saeed.

VitoDeploy is a self-hosted server management tool aimed to make it easy to bootstrap servers and easily deploy PHP applications. In a nutshell, Vito is a perfect open-source alternative to what we all know as Laravel Forge.

Re-inventing Bookmarks for Teams

Bookmarks have been around for as long as the internet itself. They’re a simple way to save websites and articles that you want to revisit later. But in the age of teamwork, traditional bookmarks are starting to show their age.

Here are some of the challenges with using traditional bookmarks for teams:

They’re not collaborative. With traditional bookmarks, it’s difficult to share your bookmarks with others or collaborate on them. This can be a problem if you’re working on a team project and need to keep track of all the resources that you’re using.
They’re not searchable. It can be difficult to find the bookmarks that you’re looking for if you don’t remember the exact name of the website or article. This can be a major headache if you’re trying to find a specific piece of information.
They’re not organized. It’s easy to end up with a cluttered mess of bookmarks if you’re not careful. This can make it difficult to find the bookmarks that you need when you need them.

So, what’s the solution? How can we reinvent bookmarks for teams?

We tried to solve this by building a new product, Linkinize, the bookmark solution for teams. whether you are working as a team, a big organization, or a group of students, Linkinize can improve your link-sharing experience by bringing the following ideas to the table.

a collaborative bookmarking tool. Linkinize is collaborative, it allows you to create links that are shared with your team, your team can access these links and do necessary updates on them over time to keep them updated.
search-based bookmarking tool. Search-based bookmarking tools allow you to search for your bookmarks by keyword, title, or even content. This makes it much easier to find the bookmarks that you’re looking for.

Together with the above key solutions, bringing in customization such as LDAP authentication for companies, integration with wiki solutions such as confluence, and much more, we have built Linkinize the ultimate solution for bookmarking within teams.

In addition to the above, here are some other features that make Linkinize the ultimate solution for sharing links in teams:

The ability to add descriptions to bookmarks. This makes it surprisingly easy to make your links searchable by keywords relevant to the content of that link
The ability to import your bookmarks. This feature makes it easy to import your current set of bookmarks saved in your browser to Linkinize.
Role Management. Linkinize supports different user types, you can allow access to your workspace to others in both read-only or publisher mode.

We believe by incorporating these features and many more to come, we have truly started a new generation of Bookmarks for teams. This would help teams to be more productive and efficient, and it would make it easier to share information, collaborate, and onboard new team members.

Linkinize is Free of an unlimited number of workspaces with a maximum of 10 members in each workspace. Join Linkinize today and revolutionize your Bookmarks experience right now.